Chimney Man

The Chimney Man is a timeless, primordial entity that is active each year around the twenty-fourth of December, and whose purpose and ambitions remain unknown.

Though little is known about him, he yet seems to have a place in many cultures of the world and is referred to them by a multitude of different names, including Santa Claus or Father Christmas by many cultures of the present day, Irkalla by the Sumerians, Mot by the Phoenicians, Old Man Murder by ████████, as well as He Who Takes Stride Upon the Thrones of Madness by the ████████ ████.

History

Everything we ‘know’ about the Chimney Man has been handed down by tradition and folk tales over the course of centuries. It is therefore quite reasonable to assume that most of what we think we know might very well be rooted in falsehood and misconception.

The only thing that is known for certain is, though a multitude of people claim to have seen or met him, investigations conducted by the Examiners of Malfeasances Attributable to Santa in the early 1960s have yet revealed that the fate of those poor souls that have the misfortune of having the Chimney Man’s gaze fall upon them is sealed, for there is no escaping him. And no one has ever met the Chimney Man eye to eye, and lived to tell the tale.

And yet, there is one ‘encounter’ of sorts that has been documented.

An Encounter With the Chimney Man

In late 1967, XMAS operatives came upon a police report by the local office in Omsk, Siberia. The following is a translation of that report:

Omsk, 14 January 1967. A man, aged ██, who insists that he ’has become the harbinger of ███ ███ █████’ was apprehended a week ago in the local outskirts after violently assaulting 87-year-old Sergey Yazov, the owner of a local bakery. The man claims that he attacked Yazov in a fit of rage and terror because his red coat and thick white beard ‘bore an uncanny resemblance to the Man in the Chimney’.

When asked to elaborate on what he meant by ‘the Man in the Chimney’, he related an event that, according to him, had taken place hours before the incident at the bakery. The following is a transcription of his relation, commented on in post by Sergeant ████████:

The Man’s Tale

I had just come home from the Christmas Marathon, an annual tradition of our family; when suddenly a blinding red light appeared before me in the chimney with such force that it blasted me right off my feet and back several metres and threw the windows wide open.

Of course, by ‘home’ the man was referring to a house that had just recently, about two weeks ago, been abandoned—its previous owners nowhere to be found.

However, much stranger than the circumstances of his staying was the fact that the man’s words were surprisingly clear. In spite of the fact that he had seemed utterly distraught when we found him, he appeared to have since calmed down. And yet, his calmness was not like on rooted in peace and serenity; rather, it was the madness of one who had experienced terror beyond human comprehension, leaving his psyche shattered and broken, to the point where nothing else in the world would ever incite fear or uneasiness in him again.

I saw a something in the light; and though at first I could not grasp its nature, it was as though there were certain... familiar features about it. At its centre there appeared to be a figure, which at first I failed to discern clearly. But as it neared and neared, I managed a brief glimpse at its aspect.

The figure appeared to be an old man, burly and haggard just the same, horribly wrinkled and aged, his gaunt body clad in a coat that dripped red as of the blood of a thousand men; his beard was thick and white, and though there was no wind that night, it moved; his eyes were a pure, glassy white, as of a blind man’s, and yet his gaze did pierce my very soul.

Here, the man shuddered as he spoke, his calm demeanour undoubtedly tested by his recollection of the event that had previously left him in a state of visible despair. And yet, his voice did not falter.

It was then that he let forth from the distorted, abhorrent mockery on the human countenance that was his face a shrieking and ghastly ululation, dissonant and bone-shattering, bearing greater resemblance to the tortured whining of a mistuned instrument than a living voice, but at the same time eerily if ever so faintly reminiscent of a laugh.

What followed was a series of incoherent ramblings describing the figure’s ‘laugh’—to fast for even our stenographer to keep up; eventually his utterances ceased being sentences, then words, and eventually devolved into the laugh of a mad man.

Suddenly, he froze; his head turned slowly to face me. Then, within the blink of an eye, he jumped up from his seat and onto the table between us, grabbing my collar and shaking me violently with almost inhuman strength, and with his eyes bulging forth from his head as though they were about to burst, he screamed

The laugh. THE LAUGH. Can you not hear it? Can you not hear it? Can you not see it? Can you not see HIM? Ever-laughing, ever-watching. Make it stop. Make it stop. MAKE IT STOP. hahahaHA HA HA HA HA HO HO HO H—

Here, Comrade ███████ took a baton to the man’s head; it took a dozen strikes to knock him unconscious. The offender was cuffed and escorted back to a cell.

The Aftermath

When XMAS arrived in Omsk, the man was nowhere to be found. When questioned on the matter of his disappearance, some said that he had been declared insane and shipped off to the nearest asylum, and a few related that, on the way there, having spoken not a single word for seven days and seven nights, he had sudden let out a mortifying scream, broken free from his fetters, and fled the transport. Some further argue that by then, the madness had already got to him, causing him to hurl himself from a nearby cliff.

Others claimed that he had escaped custody, fled the city, and relocated permanently to Novosibirsk. Yet others thought that there was more to his narrations than the police were letting on, that he had frightened them to such an extent that they simply let him go, and that he was still living there, in Omsk, having assumed a different name. And others still believed that the Chimney Man had come back to finish what he started, and that no one would ever see a trace of him again.

Which one it is, is uncertain. What is however certain is that no one, not one, has ever met the Chimney Man and lived to tell the tale. How, then, did the man survive the encounter? One possibility is that he was simply lying; however, there is another still. One that is infinitely more frightening.

The Chimney Man is known to wander the land on the twenty-fourth night of December, and only on that night. That is a rule even he cannot break. How could it then be possible, for the man to have encountered the Chimney Man at all? Though his narration seems in keeping with what is known about the Chimney Man, save for the fact that he survived, there is yet one detail that is all to easily missed.

The USSR was not dominated by the Catholic church, but rather, by the Orthodox church. And since the Orthodox church, to this day as they did then, continue to employ the Julian calender, Christmas does not fall on the 25th of December, but rather, on the 7th of January.

It follows then, that it was not on the night of the twenty-fourth that the man encountered the Chimney Man. That would explain how he survived, but then, again, how could he have encountered him at all? The answer is as simple as it is horrifying. What he saw was in fact not the Chimney Man himself, but rather his mere afterimage.

Thus, if the man’s story is to be believed, it would indicate that the Chimney Man travels the world at such an incredible speed, that it takes even light itself days to keep up with him. The Chimney Man, therefore, is indeed an entity that is far beyond and utterly unaffected by such inferior concepts as Physics, Time, or Space.

At long last, we know why no one has ever met the Chimney Man and lived to tell the tale. For by the time the afterimage of the Chimney Man catches up to his victims, they are long gone. And thus, there is no escaping him. When presented with an enemy to whom time and space are utterly meaningless, the only thing we can do is pray; and therefore, when the time comes again, pray. Pray the Chimney Man never set his gaze upon you. For on the day of his advent, the world shall know once more that the Chimney Man laugheth not.